ONLY A VERY CONFIDENT MAN OR A FOOL would enter one of the toughest road races in the world with a motorcycle that had been in production for just one year, yet that’s what Francesco Laverda did. One of 10 siblings, Francesco was the brains behind the development of Laverda from the late 1930s, expanding the range of simple farming equipment like grape crushers, hydraulic olive presses, stationary engines and horse-drawn haymaking machinery to include combine harvesters and, after the Second World War, small tractors. But, as far as we are concerned, his most important contribution to the family business began in 1947 – when, probably because there wasn’t much on television in those days, Francesco started building a motorcycle in his home workshop with his friend and right-hand man, Luciano Zen.
Most of the lightweight motorcycles on Italian roads were two-strokes, but those Laverda stationary engines proved to Francesco that a four-stroke had more stamina and was more reliable. The engines that Laverda supplied to run farm machinery were slow-revving sidevalves and that didn’t fit in with Francesco’s plans, so he designed
